


In The Beginning

by WhatAreFears



Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Female James "Rhodey" Rhodes, Female Tony Stark, Gen, Genderswap, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, Male Pepper Potts, Minor Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Rule 63, Toni Stark - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-28
Updated: 2013-04-28
Packaged: 2017-12-09 20:55:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/777890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhatAreFears/pseuds/WhatAreFears
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When metal gets hot enough it comes back in a different shape, everybody knows that.<br/>Toni Stark is Iron Woman, everybody knows that too.<br/>They just don’t know that Iron Woman has changed shape.</p>
<p>Yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In The Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote the first few pages of this fic after marathon-ing marvel movies and reading a ton of genderswap, especially Tony Stark genderswap. I adore genderswap, but I'm never totally satisfied with it, so I wrote this. I'm not totally satisfied with this either, but that's ok- the idea is that Toni got the nickname Iron Woman for her actions before ending up in Afghanistan, and I'm rather proud of that.  
> I finally finished this months after I wrote the beginning (hopefully the fic is cohesive despite the massive break in writing) because my two fandom friends bugged me into it, for which I am very thankful, since before now I'd never finished a fic, and I ran around on a happy "finished fic" buzz for a few days afterward. Lets just say, I'm beginning to understand why people write this stuff and don't just read it.

In the beginning, it is her father’s fault.

Before that, it was Steve Rogers’ fault.

And before that, it was Doctor Erskine’s.

Maybe before him it was somebody else’s fault, but in the beginning, Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed Adam and

In the beginning, it was Christine Everhart’s fault.

 

……………..

 

_First_

When Howard Stark’s daughter is born, he is on a ship in the arctic. The bags under his eyes are not for concern for his wife, or for his child.

 

_First_

When Steve Rogers goes down in the arctic, Peggy Carter is born again. There are no bags under her eyes. She cannot afford them.

 

……………..

 

_Second_

When Antonia Evelyn Stark is 6 years old, she builds her first engine. She builds it because she wants to, she builds it because she can, she builds it because

 

In the beginning, Howard Stark was always gone, and she builds it because maybe if she can build an engine then she can build a boat, and she can go with him. Maybe if she can build an engine she can leave her mother and the dresses and the parties behind. The engine runs off of perfume, not gasoline.

 

……………..

 

_Third_

When Toni Stark is 7, Peggy Carter breaks her leg. Somehow, Howard finds out, and invites her to visit. Peggy Carter is 57 years old and should probably not be in the field anymore. Peggy Carter will never admit that. Toni doesn’t care that Peggy Carter is the same age as her father, she only knows that Peggy is the most amazing person she has ever met.

 

In the beginning, Howard only talks about Captain America. When coerced, Agent Carter will sometimes talk about Steve Rogers. Mostly, when Howard is gone (because Howard is always gone), Peggy talks about her missions. Toni likes that the best.

 

……………..

 

_Fourth_

On the day before Peggy leaves, Howard (Maria) throws a ball. Toni, of course, is put into her best dress and her prettiest hair and is made to sit still for far too long when all she wants to do is sneak down to the workshop and work on her latest robot. It’s the right time for it too, the time when (normally) everyone is asleep and won’t notice if she’s down there.

 

Peggy looks stunning in her dress, no matter how old she is. Her lips are the same scarlet as her dress, her curly brown hair is tied up in the back, a few strands hanging loose like a golden halo, just enough to suggest an angelic nature. In the Bible, angels always warned others not to be afraid. They had good reason to do so.

 

Towards the end of the night, Toni sits curled up on a seat in an alcove. She has taken off her shoes (the ones that pinch), her hair is lopsided and pushed back over her ears, and her stockings are so full of runs, they’re falling apart. In other words, Maria had stashed her in the alcove so she wouldn’t make a scene.

Peggy knows the feeling.

 

“Your dress looks nice.”

“I hate dresses. They itch.”

“Well, that’s true, but they still make you look nice.”

“I don’t care about that, all I wanna do is build stuff.”

“I see how that could be a problem. Still, dressing up is kind of like building things.”

Toni gives Peggy her most skeptical look.

“Look, you put on a dress, and all the men in the room look at you. And then you do the rest.” She tugs lightly on one of Toni’s curls. “If you pull your hair back into a bun, and do your makeup very subtly, and maybe wear a classy pair of pumps, you’ve just built an image. You’re telling everyone, I’m a business woman, I know what I’m about, don’t mess with me.” At this, Toni giggles a bit. “Think that’s funny, do you? Toni nods. “Well, we’ll just have to see about that. You build me an image.”

 

In the beginning, Peggy makes a game of being someone you’re not. It’s a necessary evil.

 

……………..

 

_Fifth_

Antonia Stark goes to a ball with her mother.

 

_Fifth_

Antonia Stark goes to a dinner with her mother.

 

_Fifth_

Antonia Stark goes to a ball with her mother.

 

_Fifth_

For ten years, Toni Stark goes to masquerade balls. She always wears the same mask. The mask always looks different.

 

Antonia Stark goes to a ball with

In the beginning, Toni Stark goes to a ball, and her shoes take her dancing, and her dress compliments her on her figure; and her hair, which has always been a bit impertinent, says that it’s going to go to the bathroom and would you like to come too and fix your makeup?

 

Toni Stark gets the reputation of bending and never breaking. Toni Stark gets the reputation for wearing the same scarlet lipstick. Toni Stark has veins full of iron, but she never forgets that the color of blood is the same as the color of rust.

 

……………..

 

_Sixth_

Antonia Stark almost gets shipped off to finishing school. Toni Stark goes to MIT when she is 14. Peggy sees her off with the reminder that just because she’s going into a man’s world, doesn’t mean she’ll have no way to succeed. She’ll just have to figure out how to use her disadvantages to do what she wants. Peggy knows what she’s talking about.

 

_Sixth_

Toni Stark makes a loses a friend.

 

_Sixth_

Toni Stark goes to a party.

 

_Sixth_

Toni Stark gets drunk.

 

_Sixth_

Toni Stark makes a loses a friend

Toni Stark makes an enemy

Toni Stark gets ostracized by the nerd girls for being too pretty.

Toni Stark gets ostracized by the nerd boys for being too smart.

 

_Sixth_

In the beginning, Toni Stark meets Rhonda James in a bathroom where Toni is not (re)applying mascara and Rhonda is not escaping her drunk friends and where they are both definitely not hiding from people who have realized that their masks aren’t them.

 

Rhonda becomes Rhodey and Toni gets a roommate. Rhonda joins the Air Force, and Toni designs better weapons systems for aircraft. And better aircraft. And then better bombs, and better guns, and for the first time, it looks like maybe her father might approve of something she’s done. Especially when he only has to look at results, and not her face.

 

Toni Stark graduates from MIT at age 17. Only Obie and her mother show up. In the beginning, Howard is on a ship in the arctic.

 

…………

 

_Seventh_

Toni Stark goes to a board meeting with her father. She puts her hair in a bun, wears subtle makeup, a pencil skirt, and a classy jacket. Her shoes make her 4 inches taller, and no one says anything about compensating like they would with a man. Her lips are red, and a few strands of loose hair shine around her head.

 

Toni Stark makes quite a few suggestions for R&D. All of them get followed.

 

…………..

 

_Eighth_

In the beginning, she didn’t have parents anyway. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t miss them.

 

Peggy shows up at the funeral, late. Toni doesn’t blame her. She doesn’t want to be here either. She only came because Obie made her, and boy is she going to get him for that.

 

………….

 

_Ninth_

Toni Stark spends maybe a little too much time partying. Toni Stark doesn’t quite know if it’s because she’s running from her parents’ deaths, or celebrating them. Peggy remembers how the end of the war was, and doesn’t say anything. They both hold their liquor really well.

 

………….

 

_Tenth_

When she is 21, Antonia Stark becomes CEO of Stark Industries.

In the beginning, the corporate restructuring was a way to get back at Obie and all the others on the board. Then it’s don’t think you don’t have to think just run the business and invent invent invent. At some point, the coffee isn’t what wakes her up in the morning, it’s what keeps her awake till morning, in her lab, because she can.

 

_Tenth_

In the beginning, Toni became known as the Iron Woman, because she never backed down, and she was stronger than anyone on her board could ever be.

 

_Tenth_

In the beginning, she just wanted to have some fun.

In the beginning, she had a boyfriend and a boyfriend and a boy-

 

In the beginning, Toni just wanted to be close to someone.

 

………………

 

_Eleventh_

Peggy knows what a burnout looks like. She might not be in the field anymore, but she knows exactly what it means when a person takes mission after mission and lives off of coffee and paperwork.

 

Peggy needs glasses these days, but she sees this just fine.

 

_Eleventh_

Peggy comes over one night. Her lips are red, and her hair makes a slight halo around her head. Toni is down in her workshop. There is a bottle of vodka on the counter and a blowtorch in Toni’s hand. She’s wearing a pencil skirt, but her shoes are under the worktable, her hair is in a ponytail, and she’s wearing a sweatshirt that looks like it’s been unwashed for too long.

“You are aware,” Peggy says, “that fire and flammable liquids don’t generally go well together?”

“I don’t know, flame throwers turned out pretty well, if you ask me.” Peggy picks up the vodka and takes a swig. As it happens, she tends to agree, and might add Molotov Cocktails to the list, if she wasn’t sick of thinking about Russians and conflict and that’s not the issue at hand anyway.

“Do you remember when I asked you to build me an image?” She asks.

“Nope. Not at all. I made this image for me. I am, after all, a selfish bitch. What does this have to do with it?” Toni says, as she waves the blowtorch (not, thankfully, lit) in the air.

“When I said to build an image, I meant for other people. Not yourself. All this” –she waves the bottle- “does is build an image in your head. Everything is wonderful, everything is terrible. All the time. Am I right? And this bottle, it makes everything even out, yes?”

Toni does not answer, but it doesn’t matter.

“One day, you might need it. Save it for then. Until then, find someone you don’t need an image for.”

 

…………

 

_Twelfth_

The dork from accounting is just really good at math. Toni doesn’t, generally, listen to him.

In the beginning, too many people didn’t listen to Toni for her to bother listening to them.

She does, however, do a lot of inventing at him. And sometimes she wears her pajamas around the house to try to make him blush to the top of his redheaded head. (Her pajamas are not, by standard definition, pajamas. They’re more like… nothing.)

Sometimes, he has to deal with Toni’s boyfriends. They don’t tend to stick around for that long, but he does notice that when he lets Toni fall asleep on him while he does paperwork and she pretends to watch something on TV, there seems to be a temporary absence of boyfriends. Toni, of course, claims that she is not a snuggler.

 

In the beginning, Patrick Potts is just her PA. He listens to her, and in turn, she sometimes lets him think that she’s listening too (no really, she’s humoring him. He couldn’t make her do a single thing she didn’t want to).

 

……………

 

_Thirteenth_

In the beginning, Obie told her that making weapons kept American soldiers safe.

In the beginning, she just really liked to blow stuff up.

 

In the beginning, Christine Everhart just says: “Excuse me, Miss Stark; Christine Everhart, Vanity Fair magazine, can I ask you a couple of questions?”

“Hi, yeah. Ok go.”

“You’ve been called the great feminist success of our time. What do you say to that?”

Toni’s perpetual smirk makes itself a bit more known when she says “Absolutely ridiculous. I don’t respect women.”

Everhart’s mouth quirks at the corners, and she asks “And what do you say to your other nickname. Iron Woman.”

“That’s not bad. Why don’t we discuss this over drinks?”

 

_Thirteenth_

“Drinks” turns out to be coffee and way too many little scone things at a super-secret café that Christine knows about. In the beginning, Christine actually does ask her some questions about The Company, which quickly leads to bitching about the board meetings, which leads to bitching even more about all the men on the board and how she can’t stand any of them. In turn, Christine bitches about how she always gets passed over for promotions. Gossip ensues, though Toni will deny it and Christine will claim confidentiality agreements. Women like them don’t gossip. (They do exchange information, though).

 

_Thirteenth_

They don’t talk about Toni’s weapons.

(“Well, Chris, it’s an imperfect world we live in, but my dad had this philosophy: peace means having a bigger stick than the other guy.”

“You hate your father.”

“My father helped defeat the Nazis, he worked on the Manhattan Project. A lot of people would call that being a hero.”

“Toni, a lot of people would call that war profiteering.”

“Have you ever looked into the millions we’ve saved by advancing medical technology or kept from starvation with our intellicrops? All those breakthroughs, military funding.”

“Ever lose and hour of sleep over that?”

“… No. Never.”)

 

_Thirteenth_

There comes a day when Christine brings with her a laptop. There comes a day when, in the beginning, they don’t talk about the idiots they deal with or the dresses shoes hairstyles makeup they wield like the weapons that make Toni rich. In the beginning, the pictures on Christine’s laptop are just images of people being blown apart, somewhere in Afghanistan. Then it’s people in Gulmira. Then it’s innocents, and it’s her weapons doing the blowing up, and that’s something Toni Stark cannot ignore, not this time.

 

Toni Stark is the kind of person who either does nothing herself or does everything herself, so she goes to Afghanistan. Her last phone call is to Peggy Carter, who tells her that they should do something when she gets back. Toni sometimes wonders if maybe Peggy knows that she won’t be back for a while. Toni sometimes wonders if Peggy knows because this has happened to her before. They never talk about it, though.

 

She gets Rhodey to help her out and she talks with soldiers about tracking shipments and serial numbers and thinks about making some sort of remote access disarming device and

the world blows up.

Or at least that’s how it seems.

 

…………

 

_Fourteenth_

In the beginning Toni Stark is captured by a terrorist cell called The Ten Rings. She is dying as they take her to their cave, where their kidnapped doctor pulls some but not all of the shrapnel from between her breasts.

 

When she wakes up, he tells her the car battery was his only choice to keep her alive.

For a moment, she thinks that maybe not having the car battery wouldn’t be so bad.

Then she pushes that thought to the back of her head along with her father and she does what Peggy always told her to do: she builds an image.

 

In the beginning Toni’s image is a strong woman hoping to last until she gets rescued, a new Iron Woman, cold and quiet like metal. Somewhere along the way that gets a little warmer, becomes “friend to Yinsen” as well and she doesn’t know how that happens but

when he asks her what she has back home she tells him a little about Peggy and Christine and Patrick and Rhodey and… that’s it.

 

In the beginning, Yinsen asks her how she got the nickname Iron Woman, and Toni tells him how it started, with the corporate restructure and the endless fights with the board and how that kinda got a little twisted when Patrick started grumbling it under his breath every time she wouldn’t get up wouldn’t get dressed wouldn’t behave

and sometimes it was a little fond too.

 

In the beginning Iron Woman is a story about how things change.

Sometimes you have to tell the story to understand it.

Sometimes you have to tell the story to figure out where it’s going.

 

………..

 

_Fifteenth_

In the beginning, Toni wasn’t going to build a damn thing. Not in the cave, not for them, no way no how.

The thing about torture is that a lot of the time it gets you false information.

In this case, the information was that Toni was, in fact, going to build them weapons. Toni was not going to build them weapons. Not in the cave, not for them, no way no how.

She was, however, going to build herself a way out.

 

…………

 

_Sixteenth_

Yinsen feels awkward inspecting her chest when she isn’t unconscious and in medical danger.

In the beginning, Toni pretends not to feel awkward. It’s an image, just like most things.

They get over it eventually. They have to if they’re going to replace the draining car battery with something more… portable.

 

_Sixteenth_

Toni builds some things in a cave.

 

_Sixteenth_

Toni welds a lot.

 

_Sixteenth_

Toni becomes her own blacksmith. The hammers rub blisters and then calluses into her hands and her arms build muscle and glisten with sweat. Her hair is cut short to keep it out of the fires.

 

_Sixteenth_

Toni does some fine detail work too. She makes an energy source more powerful than her father’s atom bomb and it fits inside her chest. She’s never been more glad that her boobs are actually kind of small. She’s never been more glad that everybody thought she was a bit weird anyway. In the beginning, she never wished to be normal. Or so she tells herself.

 

……………

 

_Seventeenth_

In the beginning, Yinsen was never planning on making it out of the cave alive. Toni did not know this.

It’s not a lie this time, she didn’t tell herself that she didn’t know so that she wouldn’t have to do anything about it.

Toni genuinely

did not

know.

It makes her vengeance maybe a little harsher, a little more exacting.

 

…………..

 

_Eighteenth_

She wanders the desert hoping for help, and in the beginning that isn’t so bad. But she’s almost dead by the time Rhodey finds her, dehydrated and sunburned, with her hair shorn and more scars than she left with.

Rhodey watches over her, waits for her to wake up, leads her carefully off the plane when she refuses the wheelchair.

Rhodey lets go of her when Toni gets to Patrick.

Rhodey and Patrick exchange their usual look, the one that says “watch over her for me”, and Toni pretends not to notice.

She likes that look too much to draw attention to it and have it disappear.

 

“Tears for your long lost boss, Pat?” She says, and breaks the moment so she doesn’t have to not notice anymore.

“Tears of joy. I hate job hunting.” (Patrick pretends not to notice Toni pretending not to notice. It’s in the job description. Or something.)

 

_Eighteenth_

Toni calls a press conference and gets herself a burger.

Toni sits by the podium and makes everyone else sit too.

Toni announces that they won’t be making weapons anymore, and everyone stands up anyway. Toni rolls her eyes. Obie is not happy.

 

_Eighteenth_

Toni spends way too many days down in her workshop with her robots, making things.

Sometimes she wonders if this is some sort of Stockholm Syndrome, spending the most time in the place most like the cave she’d escaped.

 

Sometimes Patrick drags her out of the lab and makes her eat, and sometimes he lets her be and just brings her sandwiches and coffee. She doesn’t know which one she’s more grudgingly grateful for.

She does know that when Peggy comes to visit, she feels almost normal. Mainly because Peggy is getting frail, and instead of being the one being fed, Toni does the feeding. She actually cooks. This happens once in a blue moon, partly because Toni tends to burn down the kitchen in an attempt to make the oven work “how it’s supposed to”. The other reason she never cooks is because she only knows how to make classic Italian dishes her mom taught her, and those feel… too raw, even after all this time.

She sees that now, maybe because she’s telling herself fewer lies, maybe because the change happened in the three months she was gone.

Peggy could probably tell her if she asked. Toni knows that Agent Carter tells herself no lies (though maybe, maybe Peggy tells herself lies about who is coming home at the end. Toni can’t really be sure).

 

In the beginning, she fixed things and fiddled and had Patrick change out the arc reactor, which she might consider making him do again just for the pleasure of seeing him turn more red than she’d seen him in years.

 

Patrick never does what she says to, which is the reasoning she gives when she says she wasn’t surprised when he gave her proof of her heart in a box. There’s no way, no way she was actually touched when he gave her the old arc reactor mounted in a box. (Fitting, though, that her heart, too, is made of metal).

 

_Eighteenth_

In the beginning, she wanted vengeance. She built a way to fly, a way to fight, a way to do what she hadn’t been able to before, because she wasn’t helpless she wasn’t helpless she wasn’t

 

Obadiah takes the arc reactor, even after she takes out the terrorists still controlling Gulmira, and she feels just as helpless as she did in the cave, with or without her suit.

 

In the beginning she had a spine full of iron and she’s got a very loyal robot and a quixotic (yes, she knows big words other than ones used in science texts) assistant as well; that’s enough to get Patrick’s sentimental gift into her chest, enough to get her heart back to normal.

 

…………..

 

_Nineteenth_

She knows, though, that the old arc reactor isn’t enough. What she told Yinsen wasn’t exactly true, it would run the suit for a while, but

not long enough.

Or maybe, for a certain definition of “long enough”, it worked just fine. Battle’s over, after all. Stane’s defeated, Patrick’s safe, the robots are ok and Rhodey will get over it. Peggy probably won’t, but then Peggy doesn’t actually get over things, Toni sees that now. Peggy just keeps going, the same way Toni does.

In the beginning, she wanted to fix things, and she did.

Just not herself.

 

Except

 

_Ninteenth_

Toni wakes up to Patrick crouched over her, burnt out heart in his hand, eyes red and face pale the same way it had been when she got off the plane. She smiles, and so does Patrick.

In the beginning, they were sort of a team, rather than a boss and an employee.

 

……….

 

_Twentieth_

There’s a press conference, and Christine is there in the front row.

Toni’s got note cards in her hand, but every time she sees Christine’s annoyingly perfect blonde hair she thinks about the first time they met, when she asked about her nickname.

Iron Woman.

 

She could tell them all that the as-yet unnamed flying robot is just her creation, a bodyguard or a new kind of unmanned droid (which, now that she thinks about it, would actually be sort of Star Wars-ish and cool).

She could tell them that, and they would even believe her. She could tell them all about the new arc reactors she’s going to start making now that she’s not making weapons anymore, and she could tell them that she’s still Toni Stark, the woman with the iron backbone and red lipstick.

 

But when metal gets hot enough it comes back in a different shape, everybody knows that.

Toni Stark is Iron Woman, everybody knows that too.

They just don’t know that Iron Woman has changed shape.

Yet.

 

So in the beginning, she tells them.

 

……….

 

Sometimes at night she still dreams of the cave.

She still dreams of Yinsen and blacksmithing and the terror of almost dying.

In her dreams, though, she’s never quite in the dark.

 

In the beginning, there was light.

From the arc reactor, of course.


End file.
